Okay, scratch everything I’ve ever said about movie remakes. The game is now changed. As of this moment, I can’t respect any remake that isn’t like this one: a no-budget, shot-for-shot imitation made by kids with a VHS camcorder over seven years. While, we’re at it, let’s also take my rating of Boyhood down a star. THIS is a better, crazier years-in-the-making project. I’d even call it more ambitious, too.
If you’ve seen Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark 72,000 times like I have, you won’t be able to take your eyes off this. Its detail is obsessive. Call these kids crazy and reckless, but don’t call them lazy. They are dead serious about every shaky, fuzzy frame here—and they started making it in 1982 when Raiders wasn’t out on home video yet, which meant going the extra mile in terms of research alone. Part of the thrill of watching this is anticipating the action scenes from the original movie and wondering how the kids will handle them. They pull off the boulder chase at the beginning beautifully, so you know they’re not messing around.
But do they recreate the scene where Indy punches out Nazis on a moving truck? Do they shoot in a room full of live snakes? And do they risk burning down their parents’ house by staging the fight scene in Marion’s bar in Nepal while the place is on fire?
Yes, yes and yes, through methods that range from ingenious to just cause for being grounded for life.
From 1982 to 1989, these middle schoolers-turned-high-schoolers remade the whole movie except for ONE scene. It’s the part where Indy fights another pack of Nazis at an airplane fuel station while propellers swirl about dangerously. No matter how driven they may be, these brilliant brats couldn’t figure out how to acquire an airplane that they intended to explode. Fair enough.
But then a funny thing happened. Decades later, their movie leaked out quietly to the world and became a small underground sensation. At first, the makers, living their adult lives with this project fifteen years behind them, didn’t even know about it. Then they started getting phone calls from festival programmers and guys like Eli Roth and, uh, yeah, STEVEN SPIELBERG (who loved what they did and wanted to meet them).
They knew what they needed to do next: FINISH the goddamn movie. So, they did the Kickstarter thing, succeeded, got the money together, got their time off from work, got an airplane (built a fake one, actually) and then blew that fucker up in crisp digital resolution.
The completed project is now out on an independently released DVD. The effect of the newly shot scene is weirdly touching. The same actors from twenty years ago all return to play the same parts. Indy and Marion emerge from the Well of the Souls no longer adolescents, but as two people decades older. The scene is so smartly shot that you could ALMOST confuse it for Spielberg, until you get a good look at the faces of the actors and can tell clearly that they’re those kids you’ve been watching fumble around on nth generation videotape for the past hour, now grown-up for about five minutes, before they become VHS ghost dream teens in the 80s again in the next scene.
See this with a crowd, if you can. It destroys the room. At the time of this writing, the makers are on tour with it for a series of screenings and live Q&As.